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When I was growing up, election coverage was characterized by an exuberant political pundit leaping around large cardboard charts of the UK with the kind of coloring normally reserved for the weather report. The ‘exit polls’ we were familiar with only updated about every four hours and only included those people who were prepared to be cornered by the political researchers hanging around near polling stations. Fast forward to 2011. We currently have a general election unfolding in Ireland. The Irish online news site The Journal has been... [More]

Over on the IBM Software Blog, Cognos Product Marketing Manager Brendan Farnand explains just why business intelligence solutions from Cognos have a place at the Lotusphere social business event : "Everyone involved in a decision or a solution needs to know who else is involved, what transpired before they were asked to contribute and what other ideas are out there for that decision or solution." Business intelligence shouldn't happen in isolation. As I've pointed out before , many reports from sales figures to customer service levels... [More]

There's a growing battle in the location-based services business between Foursquare and Facebook. Foursquare, with its past emphasis on gaming and status building (who wants to be the mayor of the local laundromat?) is now focusing on a more functional aspect: helping people decide where they should go next. According to a report in Brandweek (backed up by this article on a recent job ad ), Foursquare sees offering recommendations as its chance to avoid being squeezed out of existence by Facebook, who, with over 500 million users, is the... [More]

In my previous life as a webmaster I was called on to develop monthly web performance reports for consumption by the whole marketing organization. At one time these had been documents that were mailed around, but we decided the best approach was to build a web interface with charts and diagrams that would be updated monthly. We showed standard metrics. Stuff like this: Each month I'd send out an email with a link to the latest report with my notes on site performance each month. For instance, I'd point out from looking at the graph on the left... [More]